Timothy James Quinn

TIMOTHY QUINN, then a graduate student at Rice University, Houston, Texas, received funding in August 2020 to aid research on ‘Queer Chemicals: Intimate Experiments with Preventative HIV Medications in Bangkok,’ supervised by Dr. Zoe Wool. This project will study the circulations of HIV prevention drugs in Bangkok, Thailand. The emergence of state-manufactured Teno-Em/PrEP is situated at the intersections of health governance and Thailand’s attempts to position itself as a hub for medicine and tourism within a regionalizing Asian economy. Health programs target populations of men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) and transgender sex workers (TSWs), while PrEP promotion capitalizes upon emerging bioeconomies and LGBT markets in Asia. PrEP also has a social life of its own as it moves through regional queer circuits, redefining perceptions of risk, while enabling new relations, intimacies, and pleasures. This project follows PrEP as it circulates within and beyond the infrastructures that have emerged to proffer, facilitate, and govern its use. Drawing from anthropological literature on pharmaceuticals, chemical relations, and sexual subjectivity and ethics, this project seeks to generate a framework for understanding the chemo-material underpinnings of these forms of sovereignty and sexual modernity. Through fieldwork across an HIV policy institute, an LGBT health clinic, community organizations, and queer/LGBT events, this project will study how PrEP is repurposed in the fashioning of subjectivity, relation, intimacy and care. What kinds of social worlds are created through human entanglements with this particular chemical commodity chain?